Wish fulfillment.
It supplies the kick to comic book superhero stories, but it’s a successful element of any number of other stories as well.
For example, in The Brave and the Bold 46 (February-March 1963), editor Julius Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox and artist Carmine Infantino offered The Hot-Shot Hoopsters as part of their Strange Sports Stories miniseries.
In this tale, undersized intellectuals aged 12 to 14 — certainly part of the target audience for this title — use their scientific knowledge to outperform top college basketball players.
The fantasy kick is obvious. Super powers weren’t just for crime-fighting anymore.
“Strange Sports Stories was a comic that existed basically because editor Julius Schwartz was a sports fanatic,” observed comics historian Pete Doree.
“The series had run for five issues in The Brave and The Bold back in the early sixties, so in 1973 Julie figured the time was right to bring it back to a new generation. You do get the feeling Julie just called (artists and writers) into the office once a month, and barked: ‘The Devil plays baseball! Monster on the golf course! Karate on the moon! And I want ’em by Friday!’”
I suspect Doree put his finger on why the series concept was doomed from the start, in both its 1960s and 1970s incarnations.
“Me and my friends ran a mile from Strange Sports Stories,” he said. “For starters, the mystery books were what you bought when all the superhero ones had sold out at our local newsagents. Sorry, but it’s true. But secondly, it was about sports. And if we liked sports, Julie, we wouldn’t have been reading comics.”
When Calford University’s basketball players are quarantined, young scientific geniuses with 170-plus IQs volunteer to play the game using their knowledge of biology and physics.
The coach finds the idea ludicrous, of course. “These boys are only five feet three inches tall!” he barks. “The shortest player on the Alvania team is six feet three! None of these card geniuses has ever handled a basketball! What…”
But the coach is interrupted by Thomas “Tightwad” Taggart, the university’s richest alumnus, who offers Calford a million-dollar donation if it can beat Alvania.
“These young students should do nicely!” Taggart says. “Yes, indeed! Brains versus brawn — eh, professor?”
“In such a contest, brains always win!” replies Professor James, the boys’ personal counselor.
“Ohhhh, no!” groans the coach.
The story reinforces a consistently admirable theme in the Schwartz-edited titles — deep respect for knowledge and education. We’d be much better off if we had more of that today.
“The story emphasizes that the young heroes of the tale accomplish things by thinking,” observes comics historian Michael E. Grost. “This identifies them with Fox and Infantino’s hero Adam Strange, who also solves all of his problems by brain power.”
The “baby eggheads” from the university’s youth education program come up with two angles for winning. One is their invention of “bioni-glandular pills” that keep them in perfect physical condition, and add to their abilities.
“If a man had the ability of the cheetah, he could run even faster!” Prof. James explains. “Or if he were like the impala antelope, he could jump higher!”
Clearly, no one had any worries about performance-enhancing drugs in 1963.
The boys’ second angle involves the application of physics and mathematics to basketball, but when they try to explain it to the coach “…the more they talk, the less he understands.”
“Whew! I can’t take any more of that!” the coach thinks. “If only they could explain to the Alvania players as they explained to me — they’d win hands down!”
The boys’ calculations determine the optimal position on the court from which each of their players should shoot — his infallibility location. And it works, with the moral support of Calford’s cheerleaders.
“Here’s to every egghead — that wears the red and white!” they chant. “Little they may seem — but they’re our team! Eggheads — hooray!”
The story features Infantino’s customary cool, well-balanced art, with a lot of vertical panels to spotlight the leaping players.
The plot’s suspense derives from the fact that the Alvania team deduces what the eggheads are doing, and blocks the boys from reaching their perfect positions.
But luckily the team has kept one boy and his secret spot in reserve. He shoots, he scores, they win and Calford gets its money. In fact, “Tightwad” is so impressed that he increases his donation to $2 million.
“The story has a consistently comic tone, with Fox and Infantino relishing every aspect of their young heroes’ underdog status and upset victory,” noted Grost.
“The small size and young age of the heroes makes them underdogs. Scientists and intellectuals are always heroes in Silver Age comics, and it is hard not to root for these guys to win.
“Fox and Infantino do not caricature their opponents, or make them out to be villains, or in any way dishonest. They seem like a professional, conventional and sportsman-like group of athletes. This is in contrast to modern day sports movies, which always make the Other Team out to be odious. The basketball game in the story is a sports contest, not a grudge match. Fox and Infantino would have cheapened the tone of the story if they had made the opponents here someone one could not respect.”
One does wonder about the emotional reaction a bunch of BMOC college jocks might have to being spectacularly humiliated by 12-year-olds in the finals of the national collegiate championship.
But that, as they say, would be another story…
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